And this would be a really, err, "freaking" boring hobby if we only had one manufacturer to choose from

I say, stick with what you feel most comfortable with, but always, always keep an open mind and be willing to step outside that comfort zone now and again. That's my philosophy, not just for computers, but it applies here quite well

I'm probably going to use the Samsung anyway

My laptop still has an HDD

Probably going to upgrade it to a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB since it uses less power than the Vector

Personally, I cannot switch from my 830 256GB SSD as my main drive in my X79 rig, it's just so insanely consistent at everything it does; I've had it for a while now, but believe it or not, it is benching a bit HIGHER than it did new! It's the only SSD I own or have owned where I truly don't ever think about the "life" of the NAND cells, considering this exact drive in this exact size managed to run many, many more P/E cycles than rated for during some extremely heavy duty torture testing over at xtremesystems (over 6 petabytes of Writes, which is over 50,000P/E cycles I believe).

The 840Pro is very nice, especially (in my experience) for the smaller capacity drives as they no longer suffer the heavy penalties they did during the 830's hey-day. Blazing fast @ 128GB or above, and also extremely consistent.

I have been putting a LOT of use into a Plextor M5P-Xtreme 256GB and a 512GB (one in an "Ultrabook", the other moved around between desktops), and I'm very pleased with them! Even going from the X79 SATA6Gbps controller to the Z77 then to an AMD 990FX, the M5P-X's performance is almost eerily constant. It doesn't take really any noticeable hit from heavy write sessions, either (as in, 60-80GB written without stop, then the drive benched immediately). It's also quite a good performer at lower queue depths, delivering a greater percentage of it's advertised max IOPS than just about any other consumer drive I've used (at QD of 1, 2, 4, 8, etc; of course they all do well at 32 or 64).
If you ever get a chance, I'd 110% recommend checking them out! They can often be had for quite a steal, in fact I got my 256GB for $179 BNIB without having fuss with a rebate!

Personally, I cannot switch from my 830 256GB SSD as my main drive in my X79 rig, it's just so insanely consistent at everything it does; I've had it for a while now, but believe it or not, it is benching a bit HIGHER than it did new! It's the only SSD I own or have owned where I truly don't ever think about the "life" of the NAND cells, considering this exact drive in this exact size managed to run many, many more P/E cycles than rated for during some extremely heavy duty torture testing over at xtremesystems (over 6 petabytes of Writes, which is over 50,000P/E cycles I believe).

(6.5 PiB * 1024 TiB/PiB * 1024 GiB/TiB) / 256 GiB = 26,600 P/E cycles

Keep in mind that at that point, the drive has already experienced read errors so data integrity's pretty much out the window. Nevertheless, even 1 TiB is already pretty impressive as that's way more than your average consumer will use and it's already beyond what Samsung has the NAND rated for (~3,000 P/E cycles based on MWI). Heck, the Vertex 4 locked up way before the MWI value ran out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Danisumi

My laptop still has an HDD

Probably going to upgrade it to a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB since it uses less power than the Vector

Lol, two of my laptops are finally getting an SSD upgrade (from 750GB 5400RPM HDD). Thankfully, I've got 16GB RAM on the laptops so haven't really had any issues with system responsiveness. I originally bought some Samsung 840 500GB but then the Crucial M500 960GB was announced so ended up not installing the 840's and waiting for the M500. The pre-order took a while and by the time it actually shipped, the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB was already announced so ended up not installing the M500's, too. Still wondering what I should do with the extra 840 and M500's.